From Hiroshima to Syria
September 12, 2013 Opinion
Analysishttp://www.herald.co.zw/category/articles/opinion-a-analysis/
*John Pilger*
ON my wall is the front page of Daily Express of September 5, 1945 and the
words: “I write this as a warning to the world.” So began Wilfred
Burchett’s report from Hiroshima. It was the scoop of the century. For his
lone, perilous journey that defied the US occupation authorities, Burchett
was pilloried, not least by his embedded colleagues. He warned that an act
of premeditated mass murder on an epic scale had launched a new era of
terror.
Almost every day now, he is vindicated. The intrinsic criminality of the
atomic bombing is borne out in the US National Archives and by the
subsequent decades of militarism camouflaged as democracy. The Syria
psychodrama exemplifies this. Yet again, we are held hostage to the
prospect of a terrorism whose nature and history even the most liberal
critics still deny. The great unmentionable is that humanity’s most
dangerous enemy resides across the Atlantic.
John Kerry’s farce and Barack Obama’s pirouettes are temporary. Russia’s
peace deal over chemical weapons will, in time, be treated with the
contempt that all militarists reserve for diplomacy. With Al-Qaeda now
among its allies, and US-armed coup masters secure in Cairo, the US intends
to crush the last independent states in the Middle East: Syria first, then
Iran. “This operation [in Syria],” said the former French foreign minister
Roland Dumas in June, “goes way back. It was prepared, pre-conceived and
planned.” When the public is “psychologically scarred”, as the Channel 4
reporter Jonathan Rugman described the British people’s overwhelming
hostility to an attack on Syria, reinforcing the unmentionable is made
urgent. Whether or not Bashar al-Assad or the “rebels” used gas in the
suburbs of Damascus, it is the US not Syria that is the world’s most
prolific user of these terrible weapons. In 1970, the Senate reported, “The
US has dumped on Vietnam a quantity of toxic chemical (dioxin) amounting to
six pounds per head of population”. This was Operation Hades, later renamed
the friendlier Operation Rand Hand: the source of what Vietnamese doctors
call a “cycle of foetal catastrophe”.
I have seen generations of young children with their familiar, monstrous
deformities. John Kerry, with his own blood-soaked war record, will
remember them. I have seen them in Iraq, too, where the US used depleted
uranium and white phosphorous, as did the Israelis in Gaza, raining it down
on UN schools and hospitals. No Obama “red line” for them. No showdown
psychodrama for them.
The repetitive debate about whether “we” should “take action” against
selected dictators (i.e. cheer on the US and its acolytes in yet another
aerial killing spree) is part of our brainwashing. Richard Falk, emeritus
professor of international law and UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine,
describes it as “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with]
positive images of Western values and innocence portrayed as threatened,
validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence”. This “is so
widely accepted as to be virtually unchallengeable”.
It is the biggest lie: the product of “liberal realists” in Anglo-American
politics, scholarship and the media who ordain themselves as the world’s
crisis managers, rather than the cause of a crisis. Stripping humanity from
the study of nations and congealing it with jargon that serves western
power designs, they mark “failed”, “rogue” or “evil” states for
“humanitarian intervention”.
An attack on Syria or Iran or any other US “demon” would draw on a
fashionable variant, “Responsibility to Protect”, or R2P, whose
lectern-trotting zealot is the former Australian foreign minister Gareth
Evans, co-chair of a “Global Centre”, based in New York. Evans and his
generously funded lobbyists play a vital propaganda role in urging the
“international community” to attack countries where “the Security Council
rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time”.
Evans has form. He appears in my 1994 film Death of a Nation, which
revealed the scale of genocide in East Timor. Canberra’s smiling man is
raising his champagne glass in a toast to his Indonesian equivalent as they
fly over East Timor in an Australian aircraft, having just signed a treaty
that pirated the oil and gas of the stricken country below where
Indonesia’s tyrant, Suharto, killed or starved a third of the population.
Under the “weak” Obama, militarism has risen perhaps as never before. With
not a single tank on the White House lawn, a military coup has taken place
in Washington. In 2008, while his liberal devotees dried their eyes, Obama
accepted the entire Pentagon of his predecessor, George Bush: its wars and
war crimes. As the constitution is replaced by an emerging police state,
those who destroyed Iraq with shock and awe, and piled up the rubble in
Afghanistan and reduced Libya to a Hobbesian
